XP Gaming, can I make a boot disk so my system is customized to run games smoothly?

[Rahbil]

I bought a new Radeon 9000 pro card to upgrade my video from a 7200 Radeon. I expected things as far as video to run better, but I'm thinking I should have left well enough alone, it seems to have slowed things... To make it short, is there a simple way for an average PC geek to make a bootable game disk in XP which will only load basic drivers used for gaming? I have 400 MB Ram, 1050Mhz Athlon, 160 GB HD, and run XP, but for some reason everything is becoming sluggish since I installed the 9000. (it may be because of resources taken up by background things). I just want to keep all background devices and antivirus etc. programs from running and taking up resources. I guess there are probably tons of ways to do these things, but it all gets overwhelming to an average gamer like myself looking on the net for tweaking clues, and it can also get dangerous if you don't quite know what you're doing and you just go tweaking at the advice of others. If anyone knows a good reliable resource for this info, please let me know, I'm sure there are others like myself who would like to use their PC to it's full capacity for gaming.